What this piece is
Positive thinking cannot fix a dysregulated nervous system. Cold plunges cannot. Humming cannot. Five minutes of slow breathing on a wellness app cannot.
If you’ve tried any of those, or all of them, and felt like a failure when they didn’t work, that wasn’t your failure. It was a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding the wellness industry has spent years actively selling, and that has left a lot of people feeling broken when in fact they were just doing the wrong intervention for the right problem.
This piece is about what the vagus nerve actually is, what dysregulation actually is, what the wellness internet has been getting wrong, and what actually moves a nervous system that’s stuck.
What the vagus nerve actually is
The vagus nerve isn’t one nerve. It’s a pair of nerves — the tenth cranial nerves — that come out of the brainstem and wander through the body. The word vagus comes from the Latin for wandering.
Eighty percent of the fibres in the vagus nerve are afferent, which means they carry information up from the body to the brain. Only twenty percent go the other way. So when you hear someone say the vagus nerve sends signals to your heart and lungs — yes, technically, but mostly it’s listening. It’s the body talking to the brain, not the brain telling the body what to do.
Polyvagal theory, which is where most of this conversation comes from, was developed by Stephen Porges. It describes how different branches of the vagus nerve are involved in different nervous system states. It’s a useful model. It has changed how trauma is treated. But it’s not the periodic table of elements. The neuroscience of it is debated in academic circles, and the wellness internet has, in many cases, taken a contested theory and turned it into folklore.
What dysregulation actually is
A regulated nervous system is one that can move flexibly between states. It can mobilise when there’s something to mobilise for. It can rest when it’s time to rest. It can connect when there’s connection available. The defining feature isn’t being calm. The defining feature is flexibility.
A dysregulated nervous system has lost that flexibility. It might be stuck in mobilisation — the anxious, restless, can’t-stop person. It might be stuck in shutdown — the exhausted, foggy, disconnected person. It might oscillate between the two. Or it might appear functional, even high-performing, while running entirely on sympathetic activation that never fully ends.
Nervous system dysregulation is a physical state. Not a moral failure. Not a mindset problem. A physical state, held in tissue and reflex and pattern, that was laid down by events you didn’t choose.
Why positive thinking can’t reach it
Positive thinking lives in the cortex — the thinking part of the brain. It’s a top-down process. In some situations, that helps. If you’re catastrophising about a presentation that’s going to be fine, reframing the thought can shift your experience.
But dysregulation doesn’t live in the cortex. It lives in the limbic system, the brainstem, the autonomic nervous system. It lives in tissue. It lives in reflex. It’s downstream of the thinking brain, and it has priority. When your nervous system decides there’s a threat, your thoughts come after.
So when someone with a dysregulated nervous system tries to think positive, what often happens is one of two things. Either the positive thought doesn’t land at all — it bounces off the body’s certainty that things are not okay — and they conclude they must be doing it wrong. Or it does land briefly, they feel some relief, and then the body’s state reasserts itself a few hours later and they’re back where they started, plus a fresh layer of self-blame.
About the humming and the cold plunges
Humming, singing, gargling, certain kinds of slow exhalation — these do stimulate the vagus nerve. The afferent fibres in the throat and the diaphragm respond to mechanical pressure and to the slow lengthening of the exhale. A vagal afferent signal goes to the brainstem, which can shift the autonomic state slightly toward parasympathetic activation. Cold exposure produces a measurable vagal response too. The dive reflex is real.
But the effect is small. The effect is temporary. And the effect can only do what it does within a system that is fundamentally capable of regulation. If your nervous system is acutely dysregulated, or if there’s underlying trauma that hasn’t been worked with, no amount of humming or cold water is going to integrate it.
It’s like trying to renovate a house with a really nice paintbrush. The paintbrush is fine. It does what paintbrushes do. But the wiring is bad and the foundations are cracked, and no quality of brushwork is going to fix that.
The suffering this has caused
There’s a particular kind of suffering that the current vagus nerve discourse has produced. It’s the suffering of someone who has been doing the protocols diligently. The morning breath work, the cold shower, the gratitude journal, the somatic exercises from the Instagram account, the supplements, the ear acupressure, the wim hof course — the whole catalogue. And it hasn’t worked.
What they conclude, almost always, is that they’re broken. That they must not be doing it right. That there must be a deeper protocol they haven’t found yet.
They are not broken. The protocols were never going to do what they were sold as doing. The wellness internet has industrialised the symptom and ignored the cause, because the cause requires longer-term, slower, often more expensive work, and it doesn’t fit in a thirty-second reel.
What does actually move it
The first and most powerful thing is co-regulation. Being in the consistent presence of a nervous system that is more regulated than yours, in a context where you feel safe enough to be there. This is what therapy provides at its best. It’s what good friendship provides. The nervous system was wounded in relationship, and the deepest layer of repair happens in relationship.
The second is slow, repeated, embodied work with the specific patterns your nervous system holds. Not generic somatic exercises. Specific work — noticing where in your body certain triggers land, tracking the sensation, allowing whatever wants to move to move, in small enough doses that your system can integrate without overwhelm.
The third is meeting the events that created the dysregulation. Not necessarily reliving them. Finding the parts of yourself that have been holding the pattern and giving them what they didn’t get the first time. This is inner child work, parts work, IFS, EMDR done well.
The fourth is systemic work — looking at the patterns that didn’t begin with you. The dysregulation already in your family system when you arrived. The unprocessed grief of a grandparent. The unspoken things that lived in everyone’s nervous system. Family Constellation work makes those patterns visible.
The fifth, much less glamorous — sleep, movement, eating enough, not drinking too much, time outdoors. Not interventions. The conditions under which any intervention has a chance of working.
What the daily practices are good for
I don’t want to leave anyone thinking the daily vagal practices are useless. They aren’t.
What they are is maintenance, for a nervous system that has already done the deeper work. They are top-up. They are useful for staying in a regulated state once you have access to one. They are not, on their own, going to get you to that state if you don’t have access to it already.
The problem hasn’t been that people do them. It’s that the way they’ve been sold has obscured the difference between maintenance and treatment.
What to be wary of
Be wary of anyone who promises to regulate your nervous system in a number of days. The number doesn’t matter — twenty-one, thirty, ninety. The promise itself is the problem.
Be wary of anyone selling the vagus nerve as the master switch for everything. The vagus nerve is involved in many things, but it isn’t the answer to all of them, and any approach that claims it is, is overselling.
Be wary of any approach that requires you to constantly buy supplements or devices. Most of what works in this territory doesn’t have an upsell.
And be wary of any framing that puts the failure on you. If a practice didn’t work, the responsible interpretation is not that you failed the practice. It’s that the practice wasn’t the right one for your situation.
Where to start
If this piece has named something you’ve been suspecting for a while, the naming itself is part of the work. Once you know what you’re actually dealing with, you can stop spending energy on the wrong interventions.
Practice noticing. Pause, several times a day, and notice what’s happening in your body. Don’t fix. Just notice. Over weeks and months, that practice alone will start to shift things — not because it stimulates the vagus nerve, but because it builds the capacity to be present with yourself.
And then, if you’re ready, find work that goes deeper than the daily protocols. A skilled practitioner. A modality that addresses the layer where dysregulation actually lives. Be patient. Be discerning. Be kind to the part of you that has been trying so hard, with the tools you were given.
About Abi Beri
Abi Beri is an Integrative Therapist, Family Constellation Facilitator, and Nervous System Specialist. He works with clients in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online worldwide. IPHM accredited. Holds a Higher Diploma in Counselling.
